MSNBC: Obama campaign reverses stance, urging donations to super PAC

-By Michael O'Brien

February 6, 2012- President Obama's re-election campaign made an about-face late Monday in its opposition to super PACs, encouraging donors to send their unlimited contributions to one such group founded by a former administration spokesman.

"With so much at stake, we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm," Messina wrote on the campaign's blog. "Therefore, the campaign has decided to do what we can, consistent with the law, to support Priorities USA in its effort to counter the weight of the GOP Super PAC."

The decision represents a stark reversal for Obama, who has been among the most vocal critics of these outside political spending groups since the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling that paved the way for the rise of super PACs.

Obama has led Democrats in opposition to these groups, especially at the height of 2010's congressional elections. Republican-aligned groups like American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS took advantage of the new rules to great effect, spending tens of millions of dollars against Democrats during that election.

"And thanks to a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United, they are being helped along this year by special interest groups that are spending unlimited amounts of money on attack ads … without ever disclosing who’s behind all these attack ads," Obama said of Republicans and super PACs that fall. "Now, that’s not just a threat to Democrats — that’s a threat to our democracy."

The president expressed his alarm as recently as Sunday in an interview with TODAY's Matt Lauer: "One of the worries we have obviously in the next campaign is that there are so many of these so-called super PACs, these independent expenditures that are gonna be out there," he said in a pre-Super Bowl interview.